THOUGHTS ON ISIS--September 20, 2014

What should we do about IS? How about we do nothing--by which I mean, nothing of a military nature. It's not our fight. It's a civil war in Syria, a civil war in Iraq, maybe a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a war between Shia and Sunni, even a war between less and more extremist Sunni. It does not and should not involve the US military. So why do so many people seem to think it should?

Mostly, I think it's because we regard Iraq as "ours," not of course in any formal colonial sense, but morally. We remember Colin Powell's Pottery Barn dictum: You broke it, you own it. We feel responsible for Iraq, and why not? Three successive presidents fought inconclusive wars there, Bush 41 to kick Saddam out of Kuwait, Clinton to enforce sanctions and no-fly zones, and Bush 43 to topple Saddam and occupy the whole country. Now Obama is doing the same.

Many say that George H. W.'s mistake was not to send the forces all the way to Baghdad in 1991. I disagree. I think his real mistake, the real American Original Mesopotamian Sin, was his initial decision to challenge Saddam's occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Not to apologize for Saddam, but was he so serious a threat as to justify shock-and-awe bombing, and a huge deployment of US combat troops? I'm half inclined to say that we fought the Gulf War in a state of hubris, because the Communist bloc was crumbling, "the world was ours," essentially unipolar now that the Cold War was over, and we needed to show our might in order to consolidate it. We thought we could get away with it, and we had the means to hand, namely military power, which was our hammer, as in "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Saddam was a nail that stuck up at just the right moment. Subsequently, Clinton's air campaign worked, after a fashion, while Saddam dodged the sanctions and the Iraqi people suffered. Meanwhile, in his Afghan cave, Osama fumed over the US presence in Saudi Arabia--also a by-product of the Gulf War.

Then, in the fog of confusion following 9/11, it wasn't hard for Bush 43 (or rather Cheney et al.) to hustle us into war, because "terrorism." I saw Colin Powell on Bill Maher last night, and was surprised at how mad I still am at him. Bush was just a fool, but Powell, Condi Rice and lots of others should have known better! It was bad enough that no one was fired over 9/11. It was worse that no one resigned in protest at the 2003 misadventure. All we did was break a brutal but functioning dictatorship, dispersing its army and ruling elites, with no clear idea what would replace it beyond some Wilsonian vaporings. We thereby exposed and inflamed regional, ethnic and sectarian hatreds that had been there long before the British decided there should be an Iraq in the first place. Like the British after they took Pretoria in 1900 (can't resist a Boer War allusion), we then found ourselves waging a prolonged counter-insurgency, in which 5000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. All of it went on the national credit card. It was the first US war ever for which the Treasury did not raise a penny in taxes. I'm still mad about that, too!

We left behind a country aligned with Iran and not even willing to let residual American forces stay, unless subject to Iraqi justice. It was Bush who first set us up for that with the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement, and Obama who found it oh so convenient to bring the last of our forces out at the end of 2011. I don't really blame either Bush or Obama for the fate of the SOFA, but would three or four thousand of our troops lingering on in Iraq have made much difference? The new Iraqi army had heaps of our weapons, many of them since lost to IS, and six or seven years worth of training. How much more were we supposed to give? Anyhow, the Iraqis plainly didn't want us there any more. Staying on without a valid SOFA, seven years after we declared Iraq "sovereign" in 2004, would have effectively put us in the position of invading the country all over again.

If al-Qaeda was blowback from the Gulf War, and of the anti-Soviet Afghan effort even earlier, IS, everyone seems to agree, is blowback from the Iraq War. Its core is further fanaticized remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who began to operate in eastern Syria when Assad lost his grip there, coincidentally also in 2011. The religious zeal of IS comes mostly from these, while a lot of its practical military prowess comes from Iraqi and possibly some Syrian military veterans opposed to Baghdad and Damascus respectively. Without these hardened military men, IS is just a terrorist group; with them, it has become a conquering army, but so far only in the power vacuum created by the Syrian Civil War and the collapse of Baghdad's authority in northwest Iraq. This is what makes the "if-we-don't-stop-them-there-we'll-have-to-fight-them-here" comparisons I hear with (of course you know what's coming) Hitler and Nazi Germany so idiotic. Hitler ruled the world's second biggest industrial economy. IS has a few hundred oil wells, by no means the equivalent of the Ruhr. They occupy a few cities connected by roads in the North Mesopotamian Plain; if only they could be flushed out of cities like Mosul, air power could make those roads look like the 1991 Death Road in southern Iraq.

But there's the rub: Americans have a touching faith in air power, but as we're forever being cautioned, air power by itself doesn't occupy territory. Don't get me wrong. Obama was justified in using air power to save the Yazidis and, where possible, other endangered minorities from extermination. Bombing to chase IS away from the Mosul Dam to "protect" Americans at our huge fortified Baghdad Embassy (the biggest structure in the whole city) was more doubtful, but OK. But extending bombing into Syria, in opposition to what's left of the government there, in an area with apparently dozens of rebel groups besides IS, makes no sense to me at all. You have to take in the whole strategic situation.

The strategic situation is that IS is surrounded by enemies, many of them heavily armed. Let's go down the list.

Assad who's almost as bad as Saddam, but didn't we support Saddam, when he fought Iran? I think our real quarrel with him is that he is actually aligned with Iran, and enjoys support from Putin.

The non-IS Syrian rebels, very poorly "vetted," as we now say. When we do vet them, I think we'll find that the moderate ones are not the ones likely to fight most effectively and immediately against IS, and it will take a year or more to train the "moderate" ones.

The Kurds, apparently very effective but only in defense of their own homeland. If they really become independent, they'll exercise a pull on their ethnic fellows in Syria, Turkey and Iran. There's trouble for the future, but for the moment they seem to need little helping holding their own against IS.

The Iraqis of the Shia regions, backed by Iran. The Iranians have ridiculed Obama's chemical warfare "red line" in Syria, but have said they draw their own "red line" against IS at Iraqi Shia shrines like Karbala and Najaf. For your real neo-cons, Iran has always been the arch-enemy. I disagree. Our tiff with Iran has lasted longer than our refusal to recognize Communist China, and I think it's time to end it, even if it means letting them have a few nuclear weapons. If this be appeasement, make the best of it. Pakistan has hundreds of nukes, and is far more dangerous.

The Turks, supposedly our NATO allies. If IS were to attack them, I suppose we would have casus belli, but IS seems too clever for that; they just returned 49 Turkish hostages, heads still attached, as a good will gesture, without even payment of a ransom. So IS is hemmed in on the north, though so far Turkey seems inclined to take few active measures against it.

At a further remove, the Egyptians, whose military regime has just declared itself opposed to IS. Actually, even the old Morsi government would have hated IS too; both are "Islamist," but different strains.

Also Jordan and the Gulf States, the former with a capable though small military and a border with both Syria and Iraq, the latter able to provide financial support if nothing else.

If it came to that, the nuclear-armed Israelis. Let's hope it won't come to that. I respect Israel and the Jewish people, but it's been a huge error, over the past few decades, to suggest we'll back anything any Israeli government, any time, may decide to do, which has only encouraged the rise of their rabid right wing, egged on by our evangelical right wing. I think time and demography are working against Israel. If it should be necessary, I'd gladly give every Israeli Jew US citizenship and welcome them here. I can't think of any other set of 5,000,000 or so people who would make a greater contribution to the US economy and US culture. But I digress.

Last, the Saudis. Here's the crux of the matter. I think Saudi Arabia is IS' next likely target, should the group decide on further military expansion. Probably even its ultimate objective. The proclamation of a Caliphate constitutes a claim on Mecca and Medina and hence a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the House of Saud. For decades we've had a devil's bargain with the Saudis, keeping world oil prices low in exchange for protecting them and allowing them to use their oil money to buy off their humbler subjects, while their wealthier ones massively endow mosques and madrassas all over the world--many of them not exactly "moderate." In this way, Saudi Arabia is also the ultimate source of this infection. Osama and most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis who reviled the Kingdom for being in bed with infidels (us), al-Qaeda in Iraq was inspired by the original al-Qaeda, and IS derives from al-Qaeda in Iraq. What goes around, comes around. Now the Saudis will have to deal with the consequences of all that. If they are to be partners in any coalition with the US and the West, we will have to lay down the law to them about the double game they've been playing.

 So most of the states surrounding IS have excellent reasons for getting together against it, and most of them have forces, many of them trained by and even in the US, and weapons, many of them furnished by the US, quite capable of defeating IS insofar as it is a strictly military power. There should be no need even for the US to orchestrate a coalition, let alone let itself be used as its air force, or its ground army, in a region where almost our every move since World War II has come back to bite us. FDR's deal with ibn Saud, Truman's impulsive decision to recognize the State of Israel, Ike's connivance at bringing back the Shah, Nixon's massive airlift to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, Carter's failures in Iran, Reagan's dispatch of Marines to Lebanon, Bush 41's war with Saddam, Clinton's marking time in the no-fly zones, Bush 43's occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq,now Obama's overreaction to Congress' and the public's overreaction to the beheadings of American journalists--horrifying, but unlike, say, Benghazi, not even an attack on people officially representing America. All of it a nightmarish decades-long clusterfuck of our own making.

This doesn't mean IS is not our enemy. It clearly is. When I say we should do "nothing" about it, I mean nothing of a military nature, whether bombs in the air or boots on the ground. Besides the al-Qaeda-derived fanatics and the disaffected Sunni Iraqi and Syrian military, there is another element to IS, foreign fighters who have flocked to their cause, and who may seek to return to their home countries, including the US. These are most definitely a danger. There are also people who have remained in western countries, including the US, whether Muslim immigrants, people born of Muslim immigrant parents, or, probably most dangerous of all, converts who want to prove themselves, who may be inspired by IS to blow up a few buildings or cut off a few random heads. Something like this was evidently nipped in the bud in Australia a few days ago.

The US should do three things. Homeland security and, unfortunately, surveillance should be continued and maybe even intensified--maybe DHS will finally justify the trillion or so spent on it since 2002. In particular, I would tag and target anyone who has traveled to that part of the world and wants back in. I would trawl the Internet looking for plots, since that's how most of them seem to get started these days. They like to blow things up, but I wouldn't overlook cyber attacks. Imagine Americans having to do without Facebook or Twitter, let alone access to their bank statements, stock quotes or Amazon for a few days! The horror! I would do everything possible to secure energy independence, so we can stop sucking up to the Saudis. That includes the Keystone pipeline, fracking, nuclear, whatever. And I would stop turning the Middle East into an even bigger weapons bazaar, which is what we are poised to do.

Yes, I'm nauseated by the sight of Americans (and others) getting their heads sawed off, women being raped and sold into slavery, religious minorities slaughtered for holding fast to their faith. But what exactly has changed over the past month or two that would justify all the war talk? At first I thought IS was trying to intimidate us into keeping out, now I think maybe they were trying to goad us into coming in. If we do, we are playing their game, and compounding all our earlier blunderings in that part of the world, which are a large part of what provoked this madness in the first place.